Why do I need an S and what year

[Perfectlap]

by the way to the OP,
if you decide on a 986S or a 987 with the 3.2 or 3.4...just my opinion, but a car at this curb weight needs at least 240 HP. But it this way, at under 240 it's all driver. At 240'ish it's a even mix of driver and engine. At over 300 its most the car doing the work. Coming out of turns under braking the mid egine set up "comes alive" if you will with 240 HP. Even the S2000 despite their torque issues, well the early ones at least, and their engines sitting just behind the front shock mounts, still benefited greatly from this amount of power. I'm sure the engineers at Honda tinkered with different outputs to arrive at this sweet spot on power. If you recall that car was well received right out of the box while many had some issues with the original Boxster coming in under 240 HP at first.

In terms of real world practicality, having 240 HP (or whatever that translates at the wheels) is very useful in merging on highways and overtaking some of these minivans and cross overs with surprisingly big engines that always seem to be in the way or doing parallels with each other on the highway.